Drag and drop categories as alias

[Carlo Didier]

I have under a top category "WHO" sub-categories like "Family", "Friends", "Club xyz", ... Obviously, a number of people are as well "Friends" as members of one or more clubs or other sub-categories. But I'd like to have one sub-category "People" which contains all the people and then aliases of those individual people categories under the various other categories they belong.

Why I don't just assign them to those categories? Because then, if I click on, for example, "Club xyz", I get all the images with people belonging to that club, BUT not a list of all the people's names ... which would be very nice to see. Hence the idea of aliases.

But, creating an alias category is very time consuming and needs a lot of operations (especially if you have to do it maybe a hundred time or more!): Create the new category, go to the properties panel for the category, click "is alias of", hunt down the source category in the whole huge category tree, click ok. Being able to simply drag and drop (with the right mouse button for example) to create an alias category would be a huge time saver and simplification of the creating of aliases.

[JohnZeman]

If I understand what you want to do correctly why wouldn't copy and paste as category reference do what you want?

i.e.  Select the desired categories, right click and choose clipboard copy.  Then where you want the aliases to be right click and choose clipboard > paste as category reference.

[Carlo Didier]

If I understand what you want to do correctly why wouldn't copy and paste as category reference do what you want?

i.e.  Select the desired categories, right click and choose clipboard copy.  Then where you want the aliases to be right click and choose clipboard > paste as category reference.

Hey John! Thanks for the tip! I didn't even know this was possible.
You saved my day (and a lot of work for Mario ...)

[Mario]

A category reference is not the same as an Alias.
When you paste a category as a reference, IMatch creates a category with a formula referencing the source category.
A true Alias category can also be used for assignments.

To satisfy this feature request I will need to add a command to the menu, and add code to create the Alias and all the other stuff that is involved.

[Mario]

Hey John! Thanks for the tip! I didn't even know this was possible.

Check out the Category View help for lots of other cool and time-saving features.

I've added a Paste Alias command to the Clipboard menu for the 5.3.4 release.

[Carlo Didier]

Hey John! Thanks for the tip! I didn't even know this was possible.

Check out the Category View help for lots of other cool and time-saving features.

I've added a Paste Alias command to the Clipboard menu for the 5.3.4 release.

Great! Many thanks Mario!
I could have lived with the category references, although they might slow iMatch down while aliases shouldn't, right?

[Mario]

IMatch calculates the results of categories on-demand, I don't think there is a large difference between a simple reference formula and an alias lookup. Never measured that, though. Categories are fast - unless you use really complicated formulas or you force IMatch to apply a regular expression for every category in the database...

[Carlo Didier]

... or you force IMatch to apply a regular expression for every category in the database...

Yep, RegExes are powerful ... and power hungry